I’m not Gone on RTÉ’s latest drama... just yet
Blackshore RTÉ One, Sunday Death In Paradise BBC1, Sunday One Day Netflix, streaming
The RTÉ series The Gone, shown last year, was about a detective returning to her small home town, and confronting dark secrets from the past. The channel’s new crime drama, Blackshore, is about, er, a detective returning to her small home town, and confronting dark secrets from the past.
We’re not talking ground-breaking innovation here.
The main difference is that the former was set in New Zealand, the latter in Co. Clare, and filmed around Killaloe and Lough Derg. We learn everything we need to know about our heroine, Detective Inspector Fia Lucey, in the opening scene when, eyeing a man in a Dublin bar spiking a woman’s drink, she follows the couple into the toilet and breaks the man’s nose. It is clear she is the type who takes no nonsense, but her punishment for this extra-judicial action is to be sent back to Blackshore.
Soon, we learn of the tragedy that has haunted her since childhood. The day after the babysitter went missing, Fia’s father murdered the entire family except her, before taking his own life. The natural conclusion among all in the village is that he acted out of guilt after killing the babysitter, whose body has never been found.
Now, years later, another woman, the co-owner of the town’s hotel, has gone missing and it is not long before her body is found in the lake. CCTV of the previous night in the hotel has gone missing, but it’s eventually retrieved – and reveals a startling twist. One of the last people to see the dead woman was Fia’s partner on the case, Garda Cian Furlong, a fact he conveniently has neglected to mention.
So, did he kill her? Why is a young woman being held captive in a caravan? Will the dead babysitter’s elderly parents (the always impeccable Barry McGovern and Ingrid Craigie) somehow seek to exact revenge on Fia, despite their years?
Writer Kate O’Riordan also brought us Smother, a show I never got into because there were so many characters, I would have needed a family tree pasted to the wall to follow it. All I do know is that anyone who married Dervla Kirwan’s spiky matriarch would be well advised to start choosing hymns.
Everything in Blackshore seems a little more linear than in that sprawling potboiler, but I’m not quite hooked yet. Fortunately, Lisa Dwan is on top form as Fia (you might remember her from the first series of Bloodlands, when that Northern Ireland-set James Nesbitt drama was at its most compelling), and she makes a solid core around which everything else swirls. As Garda Furlong, Rory Keenan (another veteran of RTÉ Sunday night drama – he played lawyer Amy Huberman’s cheating ex in Striking Out), hasn’t had much to do yet beyond looking lazy and furtive, and unable to conceal his antagonism for his new boss, though setting him up this early as the chief suspect surely means someone else is the killer.
In short, there’s nothing here yet that we haven’t seen before, but Blackshore is stylishly assembled, and we live in hope.
Death In Paradise returned to BBC1 on Sunday, a new slot after its previous incarnations on Thursdays and, latterly, Fridays. In this 100th episode, Sean Maguire returned as the villain, a neat piece of symmetry since he appeared as the same character in the very first episode. I still have trouble taking him seriously as an adult, though, because he’ll always be the young Irish footballer Aidan Brosnan in EastEnders to me.
The plot revolved around the shooting of Commissioner Selwyn
Parker (Don Warrington) and, as always, it was easily solved by Detective Inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little), though the fact we were supposed to believe the sound of a van backfiring could be mistaken for a gunshot was one of the more ludicrous explanations in a show infamous for them.
Nonetheless, it was nice to welcome some Caribbean sunshine into Sunday night. Years ago, when Wild At Heart was a staple in that slot, almost every episode ended with the cast having a few beers, and I happily joined them at home. With Death In Paradise, that has become a rum cocktail. It would be rude not to.
On Netflix, One Day is the second adaptation of David Nicholls’s bestselling novel, and in a different league to the 2011 film version with Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, whose attempt at an English accent was the comic highlight.
The premise is simple. Dexter (Leo Woodall) and Emma (Ambika Mod) meet on St Swithin’s Day 1988, at the end of their university days in Edinburgh. Although immediately attracted to each other, they don’t have sex, electing to stay friends instead, and to meet every year on that same day, 15 July, for the next 20 years.
The series splits this into 14 parts of just 30 minutes each, much as Normal People did, and it has a lot in common with that classic, albeit in reverse. Unlike Connell and Marianne, here it is Emma who is working class and Dexter who is well off, and their different backgrounds prove both an impediment to, and a catalyst for, what is to come (and, if you know the source material, what is to come will leave you in a puddle).
Where the television version scores most highly over the film is in the casting of the leads. Woodall and Mod are electrifying, their onscreen chemistry absolutely scorching. There is an ache at the heart of it all that floods from the screen, and I defy anyone not to be hooked within minutes.
It is beautifully written, brilliantly filmed, and it conjures up the dizzying excesses and frequent shallowness of the Nineties with ease, thanks in part to a perfectly curated music soundtrack peppered with the hits of the era.
Does it play on nostalgia? Unashamedly. Does that make it exceptional? Absolutely – the past almost always is better than the present. Do yourselves a favour and clear the rest of today to binge the lot.